critical commentary on adult production

Menu

PVV – thoughts from greatness, or more on XXX Church from Mark Kernes

Today I received an email from Mark Kernes.

For those who don’t know him, Mark Kernes is pretty amazing. He has been writing for AVN for decades now, crafting some of the most insightful, thoughtful, and well-researched articles about industry happenings. His work often focuses on industry-related legal issues and critical commentary on various sex-related and/or free speech-associated happenings in wider society (see the archive of his “Mental Floss” pieces here). Although he is a “controversial” figure in some circles, his adult-focused body of work is some of the most rigorous in existence – it provides a record of culturally significant developments that would have been lost otherwise. In my opinion, he’s pretty much a bad ass…

…so you can imagine how fantastic it is to get a message and comments from him!!

Mark Kernes had this to say about XXX Church, their newest campaign (which I discussed recently), and some related issues. Because some things are better directly from the source, I am reprinting Mark’s discussion/message below (with his permission, of course) – enjoy!!

Where to begin? Obviously, the commercial was humorous, in part because any aware adult knows that the situations portrayed could *never* happen in real life. It’s also disingenuous because I know from past experience with them—as you probably know, they’ve had a booth at AEE practically since it began—that the XXX Church people seriously believe that if a kid were to see *any* sexually explicit content, it would scar them for life, when any psychologist (say, Marty Klein or Neil Malamuth) worth her/his salt could tell you that that’s rubbish: Prepubescent kids just wouldn’t understand what they see and therefore couldn’t process it, and post-pubescent ones would likely simply be curious—and what’s the proper response when a kid comes to a parent and says, ‘Mommy/Daddy, what are those two (or three) people doing on that bed?’ It’s obviously time for the parents to have The Talk with the kids—and sadly, in part because of XXX Church and their religious ilk, most parents are almost completely unprepared to do that correctly.

XXX Church clearly believes, as the ‘point’ of the commercial indicates, ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ The real world doesn’t work that way. Parents have to be prepared to deal with the *inevitability* that their children will at some point see sexually explicit material, and their response should be to sit the kids down and explain what sex is, that’s it’s something that’s mainly for adults to practice (except masturbation), explain that most people enjoy sex, and that many (perhaps most) of those like to watch other people have sex. They can explain that there’s a worldwide business out there dedicated to fulfilling that desire, and that a small part of that business produces content that shows people treating their partners in a not-nice way, and that the parents *are willing to* and *can* help the kids evaluate which sexually explicit content depicts pleasure and and actions that can have a positive influence on the kids’ sexuality (which they should only *practice* when they’re ready to do so) and which content depicts actions and situations that they will probably not want to watch and will probably want to stay out of … but in the long run, it will be they themselves who decide what content (if any) attracts them.

Furthermore, the parents can warn the kids that it IS possible to like this sort of content too much, and to spend too much time watching it and/or too much money buying it, and that if that happens, they should see a psychologist because that would mean that they’ve developed an ‘obsession’ which is affecting their lives negatively. The parents might want to stress that it’s not the images themselves that are ‘causing’ the ‘addiction’ (which it really isn’t, in the same sense that coffee, cigarettes or heroin are addicting); it’s the way the kids’ brains have started to work, and they might just as easily have become obsessed with hand-washing or praying. Most importantly, there IS treatment for it.

I know I’ve gone a little beyond what you posted, but once I start on these rants, I tend to just let them play out, and I think they’re worthwhile for people to know … although I expect that you knew most or all of it already. It truly saddens me that folks like Ron actually give these jackasses some credibility by running around the country ‘debating’ them, but that’s on him, and I guarantee you, if they challenged *me* to a debate, that’d be the last time they did so.

And don’t even get me started on ‘Jesus Loves Porn Stars’ … Isn’t that some sort of necrophilia?